ESA-ESRIC
Space Resources Challenge 2021 in Netherlands
Last November 2021 I travelled to the Netherlands with Space Application Services to participate in the Space Resources Challenge organized by ESA. This was also part of my internship.
The challenge consisted on being able to study potential resources located in a simulated region of the Moon with robots that worked autonomously. Every participant was able to communicate with the robots through a simulated control center whose network was also simulating the delay that it exists between the Moon and ground in Earth.
Our team was not only including Space Application Services and the LUVMI-X rover, but also Leo rovers from the Space research at the University of Luxemburg that were meant to explore the area before our rover. Once they would explore this area, LUVMI-X was able to go to a region of interest and with scientific instrumentation take useful information to enable a Geologist to study it. Here you can see our robots:
Our team succeeded and we were selected to participate in the next round.
Finally, we were lucky enough to have a tour as part of the competition to ESTEC where we saw many historical ships and what most excited me, the Automation & Robotics laboratory:
